Deli-rium - The Colour Coordinator

I was making a coffee. I don't remember what kind it was but let's just say it was a tall latte because the odds are high. I was in a coffee dream-world, probably gazing hazily into the rich beige crema trying to find meaning in the white swirls of milk foam. I finished making it, turned round to hand it to a customer and abruptly snapped out of my latte-haze, because there, right before my very eyes, was the most unusual customer the shop has ever seen.*

She was in her sixties. On a mobility scooter (a pretty nifty one at that). And she was wearing a neon pink coat. Which was not so unusual in itself, except for the fact that her short granny hair was exactly the same colour. If not even brighter. It hurt my eyes. I had to look away, although this was also in order to hide my expression of bemusement.

When I looked back again, she was up out of her scooter, looking at the real ale shelf several feet away. I noticed that her socks were the same colour as her hair and coat. And her handbag, for that matter, which was sitting in the basket of her scooter (which, devastatingly, was metallic purple, not pink. You can't have it all).

Pink lady perused the ales for several minutes, decided she didn't actually want to buy any of them and sat back down on her scooter. She then began to reverse out of the shop, dragging a couple of chairs along by mistake as her scooter made indignant beeping noises.

I have never tried so hard not to laugh in my life.

Then she suddenly stopped before she had even reached the door and asked if we had any squashy brie. "We have Waterloo, which is a brie style cheese made in Berkshire," I informed her. Not squashy enough, apparently. Oh well.

So she carried on reversing noisily and beepily and with incredible difficulty (she got stuck on our shop sign) and I could barely breathe and as soon as she was out of earshot I collapsed onto the granite cheese counter, giggling. If only her coordination as a driver matched that of her dress sense.

*(So far).

Sleeping Pill

If there existed a 

pill that kept you 

awake for a year,

I would take it.

No more drowsing

in stuffy lecture theatres.

No more Monday mornings.

No sleepless nights.

No nightmares.

No more alarm clocks.

No more wasted time.

No more waking up with

a crick in your neck.

No more rest.

No more dreams.

No more drifting off

to the sound of a lover's

breath.

I would walk the empty

night streets alone like 

some crazed, lonely

Queen of an abandoned

world.

I would drink all night 

and lie on my back

to watch the stars

spin,

and sober up slowly,

and painfully, 

in the white dawn.

I would have nothing but

time to kill, whilst the

others slept in bed.

I could watch every film,

or read every book I'd 

I'd never seen or read.

I could learn to unicycle

with no one to watch,

and laugh.

I could lie awake all

night at your side,

watching you sleep.

Alone. Utterly alone.

At sunset my

redgold heart would

sink over the horizon

like a stone.

Each sunrise would 

wash over me like

relief.

Mr Limpopo Goes to the Doctor

Niall Limpopo woke up one morning feeling a bit out of sorts.
He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but for starters, he felt a bit cold. Not shivery. No, this was a cold that he felt in his bones. As though it ran through his veins. And his skin was pretty dry. His legs and elbows were going all scaly. His teeth felt a bit funny, too, he realised, once he'd come to think about it.
He'd been having a lot of other strange symptoms that he wasn't sure he would have noticed, individually. But together with the other stuff, he had an inkling that something rather odd was going on. He rang his local doctor's surgery and made an appointment with his GP, although he wasn't altogether sure he shouldn't be seeing a psychiatrist, too.

"Mr Limpopo?" Dr Mganga stuck her head into the waiting room.
"Uh, yes, that's me". Mr Limpopo stood up sheepishly and waddled into Dr Mganga's office after her.
She sat down heavily on her big-comfy-doctor-chair and indicated that he do the same, opposite her, on the little-creaky-patient-chair.

"What seems to be the problem, Mr Limpopo?" She had a kind voice. He felt a little less uneasy. He cleared his throat.
"Well, I've been feeling a bit out of sorts lately," he began. "It's hard to explain. I don't think anything is wrong in particular it's more... lots of little things."

Dr Mganga sighed. Here we go. Another patient wasting her precious time trying for a free, full-body MOT. The hypochondriac special. "Go on," she said. Her voice still sounded kind, only, the fake kind of kind.

"Well. My skin is very dry, all of a sudden. Scaly. It wasn't before," he added, trying to give a little weight to a complaint which suddenly sounded embarrassingly trivial. The doctor raised her eyebrows and smiled fake-kind-of-kindly.

"And I'm cold all the time. Not shivery. It feels like. It feels like my blood is cold. I know that sounds silly. And my teeth hurt."

Dr Mganga was clearly waiting for him to stop talking so that she could fake-kind-of-kindly deliver a dismissive diagnosis. So Niall Limpopo jumped in again before she had a chance to.
"AND I WANT TO EAT RAW MEAT AND BITE PEOPLE."
Fadhila Mganga's face fell. She had seen hypochondriacs desperately clutching at symptomatic straws, but never this.

"Mr Limpopo, you're trying to tell me that you suddenly have a desire to eat raw meat and BITE people?"

He had succeeded in making his illness sound less trivial. He had also succeeded in making himself sound utterly ridiculous. And a little psychotic. He faltered.

"Yes. Well. I didn't like sushi before. But now I want it all the time. And meat. I just want to eat raw lumps of steak or something. I can't stop thinking about it. And I get the urge to bite things, and people. I want to bite people. Oh GOD I sound completely crazy," and he added a little laugh to make himself sound less crazy but it only made matters worse.

Dr Mganga nodded slowly, fake-kind-of-kindly.
"Do you want to bite me, Mr Limpopo?" she asked, as one might ask a five year old if they needed to go to the bathroom.

Niall looked at her. She was a large woman, with an enormous bosom and glossy skin the colour of dark chocolate. He did want to bite her. He wanted to bite her very much. He hung his head and whispered, "Yes, a little," then quickly added, "I'm not going to though. I won't," and he seemed very sincere.

The doctor nodded, slowly, in that way that could mean either "I know exactly what is wrong with you," or "I have no idea what is wrong with you but I'm going to just nod so that you think I do." Then she asked, "Do you have any other symptoms, Mr Limpopo?"

"Well," he answered, "I was walking past a canal the other day and I really wanted to jump in. But I couldn't get my suit wet before work, so I didn't. And," he added, "I keep having very strange dreams."

"What kind of dreams?"

"Well, ones where I'm underwater, and then there are hoofs all around me splashing down through the water, and everything's all green and murky, and then I go up to the surface and there are all these wildebeest running about and I'm trying to bite their legs. Then I wake up."

Dr Mganga smiled. It wasn't a fake-kind-of-kind smile, either. It was an, I-know-exactly-what-is-wrong-with-you smile.

"I know exactly what is wrong with you," she proclaimed.

"Oh," said Mr Limpopo.

"You're possessed by the spirit of a crocodile," she proclaimed.

"Oh." said Mr Limpopo.

Then she said, "I can't prescribe you anything. Not on the NHS, anyway. And I'm not supposed to give anyone these, but here," and she handed him a small business card.

MR MCHAWI
WITCHDOCTOR
07746827364

and there was a blurry photo beside it.

"Don't tell anyone I gave you this. But he is very good, and very cheap, too. He helped a lot when my dog was being possessed by the spirit of my great-grandfather."

Mr Limpopo was a little taken aback. He wasn't a suspicious man. He didn't believe in all that witchdoctor stuff. But he had to admit... it all made sense. The dreams. The cold blood. The hunger for raw meat. He thanked Dr Mganga and left the surgery.

Dr Mganga waited until he had left the room, paged reception telling them not to let Mr Limpopo leave under any circumstances, then immediately picked up the phone and dialled the code for the hospital.

She waited for a few seconds, tapping her long nails nervously on her desk.

 "Hello, yes, this is Dr Mganga speaking. We have a high risk patient on our hands. He is extremely disturbed, a danger to himself and others. Was talking about drowning himself and biting people. Sectioned? Yes I think so. Can you send someone? Yes. Yes. Okay, I'll tell reception. Thank you."

Then she breathed a long sigh of relief. She was lucky, she thought, that she was so good at being the fake-kind-of-kind.

God of Small Things

One might believe there is no God. Because they say he is omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent. But why would a benevolent God let bad things happen? Why would an omnipotent God not stop them from happening? One might believe that God does not exist because if he does, he is flawed. And belief in something flawed is worse, for some, than belief in nothing at all.

But perhaps God's flaws lie not in his inherent power or his benevolence. To us the lives of insects appear fast and brief. Perhaps to them it is an eternity. A life time. And perhaps, to God, our lives, too, are fast and brief. Things happen so fast, from His perspective (if indeed God is a He), our lives are so fleeting, that the effects of his actions, however benevolent, happen only too late. And his actions, however slight to him, however tiny (the flap, lets say, of a butterfly's wing), are catastrophic to us. And this is why, for example, the heavens opened so hard, and so long, throughout the British summertime. Because God heard about the hosepipe ban. And He was only trying to help.

Common Scents

Walking home in the
long late sun and I smell
jasmine flowers and
fir trees in the heat.
Suddenly I'm in the
courtyard of my childhood
home, and the woods behind
my Grandma's house,
all at once.

The Ticket

We were standing in the queue to buy a cinema ticket. It wasn't a long queue but there was only one woman at the till; we had been waiting for quite some time.

Then a young man approached. Late-teens-early-twenties. Short sandy hair. Unmemorably dressed. He walked past us to two guys of around his age, who were standing in the queue behind us. He opened his mouth and words came out in nervous quick succession:

"You going to see The Dark Knight Rises?"
The two guys are a little taken aback. "Yes," one says.
"Students?"
"Yes".
And the approacher just said, "here," and thrust a cinema ticket into the hand of one of the approachees, and walked away as quickly as he could.

The ticket giver was long gone before the ticket receiver realised what had just happened and shouted, "Thanks mate! Decent of you!", and so his thank you was only heard by his fellow queuers, all of whom looked simultaneously amazed, impressed and jealous.

We speculated why he'd done it. The look on his face as he delivered his lines was one of determination. And embarrassment. Was he embarrassed to be doing such a random act of kindness? Was he embarrassed because he'd just been stood up, hence the spare ticket? On reflection, his face could have just been damming tears. The redness was certainly there. The fixation on carrying out the task and leaving before anything could be said. Before he could even be thanked.

Good on him, if that be the case. He turned his hurt into kindness. Into another's happiness. Not bad in a world where our hurt so frequently becomes violence and hatred.

Whoever stood him up missed out one of the rare gems of the human race.

Or maybe it's just all the waitressing

I think my brain sends all my worries to my feet.
I'm happy, yes.
But my feet hurt,
quietly.